Windows Vista: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Windows Mail

Email is a fast, cheap, convenient communication medium; these days, it's almost embarrassing to admit that you don't have an email address. To spare you that humiliation, Windows Vista includes Windows Mail 7, a renamed, revamped version of Outlook Express. It lets you receive and send email and read newsgroups (Internet bulletin boards).

If you do have an email address, or several, Mail can help you manage your email accounts, messages, and contacts better than ever.

To use Mail, you need several technical pieces of information: an email address, an email server address, and an Internet address for sending email. Your Internet service provider or your network administrator is supposed to provide all of these ingredients.

UP TO SPEED : What's New, Besides the Name

Let's face it: Windows Mail is really Outlook Express in a new outfit.

Microsoft says that it changed the name because so many people got Outlook Express (the free program) confused with Outlook (the expensive one).

It's not exactly the same, though. Mail has much better junk-mail filtering, as described later in this chapter. Messages are now stored on the hard drive as individual files, rather than a single, big, seething database of them, which makes possible the lightning-fast searching described in Chapter 3.

One Outlook Express feature that's missing from Mail, however, is the ability to check free Hotmail accounts online; Microsoft mutters something about making it too easy for spammers.

But that's ...